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Archive for November 23rd, 2009

I’m not that big a fan of Office 2007. In fact, 2007 is a rather bloated and slow bundle that really doesn’t seem to offer any more features than what 2003 did. It has a new UI but I can’t say I’m that big of a fan of it. As far as Word is concerned about the only thing they added was its ability to post to blogs (which really isn’t that good if you ask me). Excel is Excel and for 90% of us you won’t see a difference in the way it works. You might see a shortcut here and there, but you won’t fall out of your chair with excitement.

OneNote however got some really nice updates with moving tabs and copy/paste (which really should have been in the 2003 version). 2003 is a great version but 2007 seems like it’s more of a finished product. Of course I’m shocked at the install footprint of 400+ MB. How is it 2003 was about 120MB and this version is nearly four times the size? Now, there’s not four times worth of new features that’s for sure.

Well, Microsoft has finally seen that giving people beta versions to work with is a good idea and they’re offering up Office 2010 for download. I can’t run it at work since it won’t (yet again) run on Windows XP 64-bit. I’m considering installing it at home just because I want to see what OneNote has to offer. As far as I’m concerned you really can’t put more into Word. It’s reached feature saturation. All they seem to be doing now is trying to make it more web aware and PDF capable. That’s all fine and dandy, but as far as writing tools go, Word peaked with the 2003 version.

OneNote still has plenty of room to grow and quite honestly if they would put grammar checking into OneNote I would actually ditch Word.

I’m a little curious to see what Outlook has to offer, but considering its still such a hodgepodge of ideas thrown into that app, I doubt it will ever make sense. Or run correctly.

Download Office 2010 Beta

It’s been touch and go on whether we’re actually going to have Thanksgiving in our house this year. The series of unfortunate events started when the oven decided it wasn’t going to participate in the festivities. This unto itself is not that problematic. Anyone who knows me understands that I have plenty of alternative cooking devices. If you can cook poultry with it I probably have it. However, the real problem started when the dishwasher gave out.

I can come up with other ways to cook things, but there is no way in hell I’m washing all those dishes by hand! Have you seen the way my kids eat and the carnage that ensues once I get in my cooking groove? They should have rain slickers on!

But now they’re all working again. The good, kind man from the appliance repair place came over and within a few minutes had everything back up and running again. Apparently Whirpool appliances break in the exact same way all the time. Of course he was diverted somewhat as we went out to turn off the breakers and discovered my Bug sitting in the garage. He was keenly interested in the progress (which has been very little I’m afraid) and excited we plan to get it back up and running. I almost traded him the bug for the cost of the appliance repairs.

But now that I’ve spent all my Christmas money on appliance repairs we can have Thanksgiving once again. Funny thing is, I’m probably going to use the rotisserie and the roaster to do all my cooking, not the oven.

And as far as cleaning the plates? Well, that’s why we have Addie